Labour Holds Starmer’s Old Seat as Green Leader Polanski Falls Short in Holborn and St Pancras By-Election

Labour has held Keir Starmer’s former seat of Holborn and St Pancras, defeating Green Party leader Zack Polanski in the by-election that doubled as the first electoral test of Andy Burnham’s premiership.

Camden Council leader Sagal Abdi-Wali won the seat in the early hours of Friday morning with 12,292 votes, 45.2 per cent of the vote, according to the declared result. Polanski finished second with 8,928 votes, 32.8 per cent. Labour’s majority of 3,364 is its lowest in the constituency since the seat was created in 1983, despite a decisive margin that was never seriously in doubt once the overnight count began.

The Greens had made the seat their top target in Britain and had talked up their chances of winning it, but the result fell short of the upset they had promised. A Green Party spokesman conceded defeat in a text message sent just before 2.30am, according to The Times, saying it was clear the party would come “a close second” and describing the huge swing from Labour as an incredible result. Polanski told supporters on stage that he had no intention of standing down as leader. Asked by Sky News whether he would continue, he said: “Yes absolutely, that’s what leaders do.”

Conservative candidate Ewan Cameron finished a distant third with 1,922 votes, 7.1 per cent. Reform UK’s Peter Newman came fourth with 1,612 votes, 5.9 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats’ Patrick Stillman took 924 votes, 3.4 per cent, losing his deposit. Former Labour MP George Galloway, standing for the Workers Party of Britain, managed just 314 votes. In all, 15 candidates stood. Turnout was 38.8 per cent, down sharply from 54.1 per cent at the 2024 general election.

A win that papers over the cracks

On paper, Labour has done what governments rarely do in by-elections: it held a seat. The 13-point swing from Labour to the Greens, however, tells a more uncomfortable story for Number 10. Starmer won this seat in 2024 with 48.9 per cent and a majority of 11,572. In just two years, the Greens have gone from third place on 10.4 per cent to within 3,364 votes of taking one of Labour’s safest seats in London.

That transformation is the real headline of the night. Polanski’s advisers had briefed last week that the Greens stood a genuine chance of winning, and while that proved to be an exaggeration, the scale of the Green advance is without recent precedent. The Times reported that the result is the second-best Green performance in a parliamentary by-election ever — evidence, the party will argue, that its surge among left-of-centre voters is structural rather than a passing protest.

The question facing the Greens this morning is whether second place in a seat they could not quite win will be judged a triumph or a failure. Polanski staked his personal authority on the contest, and the verdict from within his own party is already mixed. Caroline Lucas, the three-time former Green leader and the party’s first MP, declined to back him when asked about his future on BBC Newsnight. “Let’s see what happens in the coming days and weeks,” she said, according to LabourList — a sentence that will be pored over in Brighton and Bristol this weekend.

The winner

Abdi-Wali, 42, is the leader of Camden Council, the local authority that covers the constituency. She grew up in Camden after coming to Britain as a child refugee from Somalia in the early 1990s, and was elected a councillor in 2022 before taking over the council’s leadership in May. She has rejected suggestions that she harbours ambitions for national office, framing her politics firmly around local representation.

Her victory speech was pitched as a rebuke to the politics of division. “In Camden, our diversity is a strength and our cohesion has been too hard won to take for granted,” she said, according to The Sun. She added that the community’s work of building trust “cannot be casually undone by those who seek to divide us”, and closed with a line that will likely define her as an MP: “Hope is not naive. Without hope there is nothing to build on, and nothing to build for.”

The seat and the contest

The by-election was triggered by Starmer’s resignation as an MP last month, six weeks after he stood down as prime minister. The seat has been a Labour stronghold since its formation in 1983, held by Frank Dobson for 32 years and then by Starmer for 11. Governments traditionally lose by-elections, and Labour’s late Starmer-era record in them was dismal: the party lost Runcorn and Helsby, Caerphilly, and Gorton and Denton in the space of less than a year. Burnham himself entered Parliament through a by-election, winning Makerfield in June, after the incumbent stood down to make way for him.

Fifteen candidates contested the seat, making it one of the most crowded by-election ballots in recent memory. Polling stations were open from 7am to 10pm on Thursday, with voters required to show photo ID, and the count ran overnight with the result expected in the early hours of Friday, as Camden Council, the authority running the poll, had indicated.

One of the most significant features of the contest was who did not stand. Andrew Feinstein, the left-wing independent who finished second here in 2024 with 18.9 per cent, chose not to contest the by-election and endorsed Polanski, removing the single biggest obstacle to a Green upset. The Greens also benefited from the collapse of the Labour-to-Conservative dynamic that defines national politics: in this seat, the Tories were irrelevant, finishing third with a share that barely moved.

The shadow over the Greens

The result also caps a difficult week for the Greens. At their annual conference last week, party members backed a motion declaring Zionism is racism, plunging Polanski’s leadership into controversy. Former leader Lucas called the motion “flawed from top to bottom” and said she would have hoped Polanski had been a strong critic of it. Burnham described it as “terrible judgement” and called on the party’s leadership to reverse the conference decision.

Polanski, facing that pressure on the campaign trail, insisted he would stay on. “I don’t think it was a mistake at all,” he said of the decision to fight the seat, according to The Oldham Times, which carries Press Association copy. “It has been an opportunity to present Green Party values, to talk about rent controls, tackling the climate crisis, nationalising Thames Water. It’s been amazing to speak to people in Holborn and St Pancras.”

Whether the party’s membership agrees will be tested in the coming days. The Greens have made extraordinary gains in 13 months under Polanski, but their leader has now lost the highest-profile contest he chose to fight, and the internal debate about his strategy and the conference motion will not wait.

Analysis: Why It Matters

By-elections are usually read as national weather vanes, but this one is better read as a microscope. Holborn and St Pancras is not Britain; it is a particular inner-London constituency where the Conservatives have been irrelevant for a generation and the contest is between two parties fighting for the same left-of-centre voter. What happened there reveals more about the battle for the left than about Burnham’s national standing — though Burnham will certainly claim it as both.

The first reading, and the one Labour will promote, is straightforward: a new prime minister has passed his first electoral test. Governments almost never gain ground in by-elections; the fact that Labour held a seat on a 13-point swing against it sounds perverse, but the swing was to the Greens, not to the right. Nationally, the most serious threat to Burnham is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, and in this constituency Reform managed under six per cent. Labour’s coalition of the centre held where it mattered.

The second reading is more troubling for Labour. A 13-point swing to the Greens in a seat Labour has owned since 1983 is not a protest vote; it is a realignment. The Green vote share tripled from its 2024 level. In the local elections in May, the Greens surged in London, and this result confirms that the surge has a parliamentary expression. Burnham’s appeal to Green-minded voters — his direct, emotive style, so different from Starmer’s managerial tone — plainly worked for some voters and failed for others. The seat’s voters gave him a pass, not an embrace.

The third reading concerns turnout. At 38.8 per cent, participation was down more than 15 points on 2024. Low turnouts in by-elections usually punish incumbents, yet Labour’s core vote held firm enough. The more interesting question is who stayed home: if the missing voters are disproportionately young, left-leaning voters who turned out for Starmer in 2024 and now feel unrepresented, their absence is a warning for the next general election, not just a statistical footnote. Labour strategists will be studying the ward-level data this weekend with unusual intensity.

For the Greens, the result is a genuine fork in the road. Polanski’s leadership has delivered the party’s best parliamentary by-election result ever except one, and taken the fight to Labour in one of its safest seats. That is a real achievement, and the party’s spokesman’s framing — a “huge swing” that shows how far the Greens have come — is defensible. But the leadership question will not go away. A party that has just lost its highest-profile contest, amid a conference controversy that its own former leader publicly condemned, cannot simply declare victory and move on. Lucas’s refusal to back Polanski on Newsnight was the most significant sentence of the night after the result itself. If the membership’s mood sours, the Greens could spend the coming months on internal warfare rather than on the local elections that are their real path to power.

What to watch next: first, whether Polanski survives the week — the Green leadership rules and the mood of the parliamentary party will matter more than his on-stage defiance. Second, whether Burnham can convert a defensive hold into an offensive argument, using the result to claim that his Labour can win back the left while holding the centre. Third, the conference motion on Zionism: Burnham has demanded its reversal, and the Greens’ answer will shape how the party is treated by the press and by Jewish community organisations in the months ahead. And fourth, the data: when the ward breakdowns are published, they will show exactly where Labour’s vote held and where it bled — the most important map in British politics this autumn.

Sources

• Reuters: UK PM Burnham’s Labour fends off left-wing Greens in local election
• The Times: Holborn & St Pancras by-election result: Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali wins
• Press Association via The Oldham Times: Labour retains Starmer’s Holborn seat defeating Green leader Zack Polanski
• LabourList: Labour defeats Zack Polanski in Holborn and St Pancras by-election